Aerojet Rocketdyne Layoff Affects 150 In Canoga Park California

Aerojet, the parent company for Rocketdyne, announced layoffs for nearly 225 workers, including 150 at the facility in Canoga Park, California. The other employee reductions will take place at headquarters in Sacramento, California.

These layoffs primarily affect the engineering and operations positions, as well as their counterparts in the supply chain management, product procurement and business development.

Warren M. Boley Jr., Aerojet President, sent a letter to the impacted employees saying that it was necessary to staffing eliminate redundancies following the July 2012 acquisition of Rocketdyne by GenCorp (the owner of Aerojet). Rocketdyne, was sold by its owner Pratt and Whitney for $550 Million. 

Boley commented on achieving efficiencies, post acquisition:

Now that we have successfully combined our two companies, we must address the need to ensure long-term customer affordability and market competitiveness.

This reflects the continued slowdown and downsizing of Southern California’s once booming Military, Defense and Aerospace industries.  Rocketdyne was a provider of high-value propulsion, power, energy and innovative system solutions used in a wide variety of government and commercial applications; These included the main engines for the Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, missile defense systems and advanced hypersonic engines. Now that defense spending has been reduced over the last few years, and there are few new military and aviation contracts in the near future, companies are forced to merge their resources in order to stay viable.

Just after being acquired, Rocketdyne initiated  staffing cuts in November 2012 when it eliminated 100 positions as a response to an uncertain future of the space industry and the general economic climate. Aerojet still has over 5,000 employees at 16 sites across the United States and throughout the world, focused on the design and development of aerospace and defense propulsion and energetics to the space, missile defense, strategic, tactical missile and armaments sectors.

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(Image Credit – Aerojet / Rocketdyne)

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